Posts tagged with: google

Vatican Radio in Rome turned to Kishore Jayabalan, Director of Instituto Acton, for comment on a recent Italian court ruling which held three Google executives criminally responsible for a YouTube video depicting a teenager with Downs Syndrome being bullied. Vatican Radio’s short article on the matter is here; the audio is available via the audio player below.

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What do you look for when you are searching for a job? A growth industry? A healthy bottom-line? A positive corporate culture? Some combination of the above?

Fortune magazine recently rated the “Top 100 Places to Work.” Not surprisingly, at the top of the list is Google, which not only is dubbed the “millionaire factory” because of its generous stock option packages and a matching top tier share price, but because of the innovation associated with its workplace. Employees are encouraged to spend a good chunk of their time focusing on their own “pet” projects.

But second on the list is a Michigan-based company, Quicken Loans. What makes Quicken a great place to work? “Ethically driven” is what one employee calls the online mortgage lender: “It avoided the subprime crisis by sticking with plain-vanilla loans.” You don’t need to be a “social entrepreneur” in the latest sense of the term to be “ethically driven.”

So what connection is there between the top two companies on Fortune‘s list? Google’s well-known motto is: “Don’t be evil.” You might call that the “silver rule” of business ethics. (The “golden rule” would be a positive statement like, “Do be good.”)

To the extent that Google and Quicken embody a way of doing business that emphasizes both profits and ethics, we can see how in the long run ethical business makes the most economic sense.

Via Slashdot, news comes today that Google’s next shareholders meeting will feature a vote on a shareholder resolution to protect free speech and combat censorship by intrusive governments.

According to the proxy statement, Proposal Number 5 would require the recognition of “minimum standards,” including, that “the company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures,” and that “the company will not engage in pro-active censorship.”

Part of the basis cited for the proposal is the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares that the “advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.”

One of the specific provisions of the declaration related to freedom of speech is Article 19: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

I’m curious to see how this resolution fares and how the directors, especially considering that Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said that the company’s cooperation with China “a net negative.” External considerations might also be at play, given the potential for legislation like the Global Online Freedom Act of 2007 to regulate the activities of companies like Google.

One interesting aspect of this purchase is that the software’s inventor won’t profit from its sale, since it was run under the auspices of a non-profit and was financed by public money. “It’s not an operating business that was sold, just the software and a web site. Although I would gladly accept that kind of money,” said Rosling.

To see the software in action, see the video of a lecture given by Rosling in February of 2006. Don’t just pay attention to the software, however. Rosling has some pretty important observations about how the West views the “developing” world.

This from the official Google blog: “We’ve always recognized the importance of copyright, because we believe that authors and publishers deserve to be rewarded for their creative endeavors. And we specifically designed Google Book Search to respect copyright law – never showing more than two or three snippets around a search term without the publisher’s prior permission, which they can give through our Partner Program.”

Google announced plans today to partner with the National Archives to digitize the institution’s media holdings, specifically through a pilot project to “digitize their video content and offer it to everyone in the world for free.” The plan is to make these resources readily available for educational use.

As Jon Steinback, Product Marketing Manager of Google Video, writes, “For many momentous events, words and pictures don’t transmit the full sense of what has transpired. To see for one’s self, through video and audio, brings an event to life.”